I haven’t looked closely at JSO but in my mind it’s closely associated with Extinction Rebellion and similar movements and I’m going to speak about them generally although if I’m inaccurate in my criticisms of JSO specifically then that’s on me.

These organisations are critically flawed because they lack materialist analysis. They base their movements on Momentum and really idealistic electoralism (see: advocating for Citizens Assemblies, positioning themselves as “beyond politics”) and other nonsense.

They have a tendency to engage in Alinsky-style performative protests against the powerbrokers while they actively disrupt the lives of average people, and this has caused significant backlash and negative sentiment towards XR and JSO from society at large rather than doing anything that resembles mass line work.

They base their protest movements on dogmatic non-violence and they make the assumption that peaceful protests lead by people like Gandhi and MLK achieved their goals independent of the more militant threats that existed contemporaneously such as those led by Bhagat Singh, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers.

They intend to “clog up” the judicial system by having their protesters be brought up on charges regularly, ignorant of the fact that the government can crack down harder on activists, it can expand the capacity of its judicial apparatus, and it can pass more severe legislation to allow for legal proceedings to be much more summary than they currently are.

They had a come-to-jesus moment, at least in the UK, around the start of the pandemic and the lead thinker for Extinction Rebellion brought up critical issues with the movement, not least of all their sudden loss of organisational momentum and the mounting public backlash they were facing, and yet I see no change in their MO from this point (although I haven’t been looking closely so take that for what it’s worth.) I believe that it’s in this video, if you can bear an hour and a half of the speaker being completely ideologically blinkered and basically for using the entire speaking opportunity to shill his book.

If I were running a COINTELPRO operation to surveil and subvert the nascent climate change activist movement what I would do is I would create an organisation which more often than not targets the average person in order to alienate them to create a general consensus that is hostile to climate change activism and thus is opposed to anything associated with the movement, including legislation to mitigate climate change. I would get the most committed activists and funnel their opportunities for developing class consciousness and revolutionary spirit into dead-end crypto-liberalism. I would encourage that activists spend vast sums of money paying fines and legal fees so that cash which could create thriving organisations that threaten the system get diverted and soaked up by the state. I would create a culture of activism which, by design, means that the most committed activists accrue extensive criminal records that will prevent them from getting jobs that pay well or which have significant political influence in the future while also providing a pretext for closer surveillance, harsher penalties, and to create thorough documentation of each individual via the collection of biometric data etc.

There was a tweet that went up on an official Extinction Rebellion twitter account which, if I’m remembering correctly, encouraged people to literally post their fingerprints publicly. I can’t pull it up because the search results are clogged with shitty journalism but this was something that came up years ago and when I saw it I was like: “Fuck me, that’s exactly what I’d be doing if I was running an op.”